by Alan Johnson
Having learned that it wasn’t a good idea to try to read from a prepared script, instead I’d scribbled down some notes that morning on a piece of lined paper in the hotel room I shared with Dave Stock. I hoped these would at least keep me on track. I had stopped short of attempting to rehearse what I was going to say in front of the bathroom mirror.
I had about five minutes to get my case across. Rather disconcertingly, a series of lights on the rostrum was used to indicate the time you’d used. When the red light came on it meant you needed to wind up your speech. If you ignored it, the chair would intervene and might even on occasion switch off the microphone, leaving the speaker standing there looking like a discombobulated goldfish.
It went OK. I warmed to my theme, telling the conference how, in the 1971 strike, I had got more money for my dependants from social security than I earned as a postman on incremental scales. I emphasized the nonsense of a counter clerk still having to wait until he was in his late twenties before being considered worthy of maximum pay, a telephonist until she was in her thirties.
One of the union’s national officers replied, patiently explaining that while pay remained subject to the social contract – the agreement made a couple of years earlier between government and unions whereby unions agreed to abide by wage-increase limits set by the government – there was no possibility of achieving what the motion was asking for. It might be desirable but it was unattainable, and conference should reject the proposition. Which they did. Overwhelmingly.
Still, I’d taken the plunge. For the first time the conference bulletin, published each day, featured my name, the Slough Amalgamated Branch was participating in debates and, intriguingly, according to Joe and Dave, one person on the platform behind me as I spoke seemed to be taking a particular interest. That person was Tom Jackson, the general secretary.
Unlike me, Linda had passed her driving test at the first attempt. But at the age of eighteen she put her driving licence in a drawer and never drove again.
Now, without Mike, she was marooned at the end of that long country lane, surrounded by fields, in rural Bedfordshire. Fortunately, her neighbours in the cluster of houses around her were supportive, especially her good friend and next-door neighbour Sally, whose daughter Ann had been babysitting the children the evening Mike had arrived home roaring drunk and collapsed in the bath. They helped make life bearable in the bleak aftermath of Mike’s suicide.
Often it was a case of one step forward, two steps back. Like the day Sally spent an hour digging up weeds from around Linda’s house, leaving them on the doorstep on a piece of newspaper for disposal. When Linda came home and found what she took to be plants left for her as a gift, she spent an hour putting them back into the garden. Mike had always done the gardening. Like most of us city kids, Linda didn’t know the difference between weeds and flowers.
I would go and stay with her at weekends, sometimes with Judy and the kids; often alone. That summer a caravan holiday in Porthcawl was arranged for Linda and her children and a friend’s family. I hired a car to drive my sister, her three boys and Shandy the dog across to Wales. (Renay and Tara had gone ahead with the other family.) I can’t remember why I didn’t take my own car but I often lent it to Ernie Sheers, who didn’t have a car of his own, when he needed to get to east London, where his mother was poorly. So perhaps he had it that day.
As we set off from Stopsley the weather was atrocious and by the time we reached the motorway it was worse – the closest Britain can get to a monsoon. As we belted along the windscreen wipers stopped in mid-wipe. I know nothing about cars, along with much else men are supposed to know about. At home on the Britwell I had a foolproof way of dealing with car trouble. I’d just lift the bonnet and lean in as if I knew what I was doing. As the car would be parked on the green in full view of my neighbours’ living rooms, it would be only a matter of minutes before Martin or Tony or Robert or Mick sauntered out to ask what the problem was. Within another ten minutes I’d be standing back having a relaxing smoke, or perhaps kicking a ball around with the kids, as a couple of my neighbours bent diligently over the engine, fixing whatever was wrong. It worked every time.
But nobody was around to fix the problem now. For a while I drove very, very slowly down the inside lane but eventually the lack of visibility forced me to pull into a service station to have another go at getting the wipers to work. I was soaked to the skin, the dog was barking, the boys were restless and Linda was unhelpfully telling me that I should have joined the RAC.
Somehow, miraculously, my pulling and prodding, accompanied by profanities uttered under my breath so that the children didn’t hear, succeeded in getting the windscreen wipers on this brand-new hire car working again. I dropped off my cargo at the caravan site and headed home.
My sister had something akin to a nervous breakdown on that holiday. She’d been so determined to present a brave face to the world and was so focused on the children – the two in her temporary care as much as her own three – that the grief had accumulated, like a tidal surge behind a stout harbour wall.
After our stormy journey the sun had shone over Porthcawl. Linda and her friend Jan took their combined brood of seven kids to the seaside, where they built sandcastles, ate ice-cream and lazed on the beach. But towards the end of the week two events triggered a reaction in my sister.
The first was the death of Elvis Presley. It wasn’t so much grief for the King that got to Linda; more the stirring up of her own sense of loss by the huge media coverage of the demise of a young man and the ubiquitous photographs of Elvis in his coffin.
At the same time Jan’s husband arrived to spend the last few days of the holiday with his wife and daughters, just as Mike would have done if he’d been alive. The double breach of her defences plunged Linda into a deep depression. She couldn’t stop crying and refused to leave the caravan. Jan and her husband eventually coaxed her out and brought her home, curtailing the holiday. I was contacted and went straight to Stopsley. We talked, Linda and I, long into the night. She’d been widowed for almost five months; an attractive young woman, bright, vivacious but still reliving every day the misery of the recent past. I told her that nobody could reasonably expect her to don widow’s weeds and spend the rest of her life pining for Mike. She needed to try to build a new one, for her own sake and for the sake of her children.
By 1978 I’d made a firm decision to embark on the road to standing for election to the executive council. Around thirty postal workers put their names forward every year for fifteen positions – thirty out of around 180,000 postal members. The only qualification necessary was the nomination of a candidate’s own branch. That might not sound like much of an obstacle but there were two major hurdles in my path. The first was my youth and significant lack of union experience. The second was myself.
My personality was steeped in the self-effacement that held back so many working-class people. The ultimate fear was of being thought too big for your boots, the ultimate humiliation the accusatory question: ‘Who does he think he is?’ It was why brilliant Sunday-morning footballers would play down their performance in the post-match banter. Why Len Rigby had cheerfully endured being date-stamped and dispatched every morning; why my late brother-in-law had hidden his light under a bushel and why I didn’t like to be seen reading The Times. Perhaps this was a hangover from the era when the working classes knew their place that was supposed to have disappeared in the 1960s.
Whatever its origins, it wasn’t something that could be analysed or rationalized. The simple fact was that I could never in a million years have asked Joe or Dave if the branch could nominate me for the executive council. Len Rigby had never been nominated. Joe had been around for years, and he’d never been nominated. Those who stood for the executive council were invariably holders of senior district council positions and from the big branches such as Glasgow, Manchester, Mount Pleasant or Birmingham. For me to suggest that my name should be put forward after a year or so as chairman, and
at an age where some would consider me too young even to be a branch official, would have been outrageously presumptuous.
So I continued my double life as rural postman and secretly ambitious union rep. I had no interest in the many opportunities available to become a union office holder at a lower level through the Council of Post Office Unions or the regional structure of lay members. It was being at the centre of things that interested me; the sense of theatre at conference. I wanted to hold and sway an audience like the charismatic John Taylor could. I wanted to go from delivery frame to union headquarters in one jump.
Joe, who was district organizer for an area embracing the whole of Berkshire and a bit of Oxfordshire, did suggest I take the role of assistant district organizer. It was a very minor position, involving arranging district council elections and paying delegates’ travel expenses at our quarterly DC meetings. In other words, a non-job at a talking shop in a tiny patch of south-east England – hardly comparable to my respected mentor suggesting I be nominated for the executive. For the moment I accepted this position and the special silver UPW badge it entitled me to pin on my lapel (we went to DC meetings in suits rather than in uniform), looking forward to the day when I would be able to wear the same badge in gold – the badge of an executive council member.
Joe and I were not entirely compatible so far as our politics were concerned. Unlike him, I was very critical of the Callaghan government. While never a Bennite, I was an opinionated fellow-traveller. Having decided that the Labour party was the appropriate vehicle for the transformation of society I wanted to see, I would often pontificate about the final scene in Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs, standing on their hind legs and wearing clothes, are no longer distinguishable to the other animals from the humans against whom they revolted. This, I’d pronounce to whoever I was talking at, was exactly how I felt when I looked at Labour and Conservative MPs.
In the British Legion with Mick and Idris on a Sunday lunchtime I’d drone on about ‘my people’ and declare that I wished to put whatever talents I possessed at the service of the working class. I blush now at this patronizing nonsense but I can’t deny that the idealistic little prick in the tank top and flares was me.
Leaving aside the self-centred romanticism, I was and remain devoted to two causes: the eradication of poverty and greater equality. All else was a means to those ends. This put me more in tune with Tony Crosland than with Tony Benn, but the late 1970s were a tumultuous time and the dividing line between democratic socialism and dictatorship of the proletariat was sometimes difficult to discern in the battle for hearts and minds within the Labour movement.
While I wasn’t particularly interested in my South-East District Council I was very interested in the London District Council which, as I’ve mentioned, exercised real power as the co-ordinating force in the capital. Its leader, John Taylor – who was by this time also a member of the executive council – and his assistant, Derek Walsh, had become firm friends of mine. I’d solicited their support for a couple of Slough amendments aimed at preventing the casualization of the industry and improving protection for the men and women who delivered cash to post offices. By now, with equal-opportunities legislation taking effect, there were postwomen in Slough. Brenda, a 4ft 10in dynamo, became our first full-time female delivery officer around this time. Within a year she’d entered the most macho enclave of the office: the HGV drivers. As she often said, even someone without a Yorkie Bar could drive a truck.
Derek Walsh was John’s calm, more cerebral alter-ego. A small man with a well-trimmed moustache and beard, he always wore one of those tunic-style leather jackets. The sleeves were far too long, making him look as if he’d had his hands amputated. Brought up in a large south London family, he was, like so many union officials, completely self-educated. Derek was always discovering verses and quotations which he insisted on copying and sending to me. He also made up a few himself. ‘He who would generalize, generally lies’ is one that springs to mind.
Along with the snatches of Shakespeare he’d picked up, he could quote entire passages of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I knew one verse by heart (which I’d found in a short story by the American author O. Henry). When Derek and I were alone we’d indulge in our guilty secret and savour the beauty of this verse:
Ah, Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
At around this time the UPW was embroiled in a dispute that had been simmering since the glorious summer of 1976 and became a focus for trade-union rights and labour-relations law. The dispute was over union recognition and it involved 143 mainly Asian women workers in north-west London.
Grunwick in Cricklewood processed films by mail order. The owner, George Ward, was fiercely anti-union and, in an effort to force recognition, the women had been taking industrial action. Things came to a head when the UPW decided to ‘black’ the firm’s mail in support of the women and in an effort to force Grunwick to go to arbitration at ACAS (the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service). While George Ward had managed to continue operating through the dispute, he couldn’t cope without the mail service. He agreed to attend talks at ACAS and the embargo was lifted.
Meanwhile, the court action pursued by the right-wing National Association for Freedom over the South African boycott had led to postal workers being told that they did not have the right to take industrial action because of an ancient law, aimed at highwaymen, stating that it was an offence to ‘wilfully delay the Queen’s mail’.
Not only did the talks at ACAS fail, George Ward tried to sue the arbitration service because it hadn’t consulted his strikebreaking labour force. When the UPW executive refused to reinstate the embargo of Grunwick’s mail because of the danger of fines and sequestration, John Taylor and Derek Walsh threw the weight of the London District Council behind the hundred or so postmen at Cricklewood who wanted to cease to deliver and collect from the company. This resulted in the Cricklewood men being ‘locked out’ (in other words, not allowed to go back to work unless they handled Grunwick’s mail), a mass picket involving thousands, including coachloads of Yorkshire miners, and disciplinary action against Taylor and Walsh by their union. The two were fined what was then a record sum for a union to impose on its own officials.
I was a firm supporter of the decision taken by the LDC to back the Cricklewood members. Indeed, I’m sure Tom Jackson himself was extremely sympathetic. But, as he said at the following year’s conference, during another high-octane debate: ‘One of the penalties of leadership … is to make difficult and hard decisions … decisions which have to be taken in the interests of your union.’
Neither John nor Derek bore any antipathy towards Tom Jackson. Derek told me how wounded he’d been by a comment Tom made during a private meeting held to discuss the fall-out from Grunwick. After Derek had set out the moral argument that had persuaded him to defy the executive, Tom asked him if he considered himself to be the conscience of the union. As always, it was Derek who thought deeply about such things while the more cavalier John earned the plaudits.
I spoke in defence of my London friends at the 1978 conference but it was a different debate that led to the resolution of the tricky problem of how I could get myself nominated for the executive council.
The conference that year was held in the Winter Gardens, Blackpool. As an assistant district organizer I was allowed to move or second propositions at conference on behalf of any branch within the district and I was asked by the Reading branch to move an amendment on some subject or other that I can’t recollect. It was the first time I’d done this and such was my determination to put on a good show that I even wore my silver ADO’s badge, despite my mod’s aversion to such fripperies, pinned to the lapel of my black suit.
I was called to the rostrum for what I thought was the Reading amendment only to hear from beh
ind me on the platform the chairman telling me, sotto voce, that I was about to speak on the wrong proposition. It was my third annual conference, my first as an ADO, and I found myself retreating from the rostrum, dazed and confused, in front of the huge audience. As I picked my way past the delegates on the long, excruciating walk back to my delegation, seated under the magnificent balcony that was a feature of this most atmospheric of conference halls, I noticed that my silver badge had slipped from my lapel and was just about clinging to my jacket, upside down by the end of its long pin. It seemed to be a metaphor for this complete disaster.
As I sat bemoaning my fate, Dave Stock nudged me: ‘Look who’s walking towards us.’ It was none other than our revered general secretary, who had stepped down from the platform and did indeed seem to be heading in our direction, though it was difficult to be sure as his progress was constantly being halted by delegates wanting a brief word or a handshake.
‘Now then, young Alan,’ he said, in his refined Yorkshire accent, when he finally reached us. ‘If you’re going to be a conference star you’ll have to learn more about procedure.’
I was too stunned to reply. I couldn’t believe that he’d bothered to leave the platform in the middle of a debate just to give a humble delegate from Slough a piece of advice. Joe Payne, Dave Stock and our wonderful telephonist rep, Rose Ticket, were all within earshot, wearing expressions reminiscent of palace kitchen staff receiving a visit below stairs from the monarch.
Tom hadn’t finished. ‘Have you ever thought about standing for the executive council?’ he asked.